Peach Pies and Alibis (27 page)

Her mother nodded and touched Ella Mae’s cheek. “You’ll find that too. I promise you.”
She wiped away her tears and smiled. “And you’re right, we have all the time in the
world to build new memories together.”

A buzzing noise sounded from the corner of the room and Verena jumped up to pull her
cell phone from her purse. She examined the screen and her face instantly turned wan.
“No!” she cried. The hand holding the phone began to tremble violently.

“What is it?” Dee asked, rushing to Verena’s side, with Sissy on her heel. Instinctively,
Ella Mae reached out to grasp her mother’s hands. Behind them, Reba adopted her gunfighter’s
stance, her fingers poised over the holster on her hip, her eyes dark and wary.

Verena glanced around the room, her eyes falling on each of them, but they were wide
and glazed with shock and could
focus on nothing. “Buddy sent me a text,” she said in an uncommonly soft voice. “I
asked him to check on Freda while I was here.”

There was a long pause in which they all waited for someone to ask the question no
one wanted to ask. Finally, Reba squared her shoulders, exhaled, and said, “And?”

“She passed on a few minutes ago. Oh, Lord help us all. Freda Shaw is dead.”

It took a moment for Verena to come out of her daze.

“I need to call Buddy and find out what happened,” she said and half stumbled from
the room, leaving the rest of the women to sit in stunned silence. They were so quiet
that Ella Mae could hear the sound of the antique mantel clock ticking. She’d always
loved the pretty old clock. Its white porcelain case was decorated with pink peonies
and golden buttercups and reminded her of a wedding cake. Ella Mae used to beg Reba
to let her open the glass door so she could gently wind the clock with its tiny metal
key.

Now, as the hour struck eight, the chorus of high-pitched chimes was not a welcome
sound. They were too merry, too rich and sweet, like an oversugared dessert. When
Ella Mae had been a girl, she used to stretch out on the sofa and wait for the tiny
bells to ring. The airy music would make her think of carousels and ballet dancers
and the song of the ice cream man’s truck.

In the face of Freda’s death, however, the sound was
mocking and cruel, and Ella Mae was half tempted to cover her ears. Glancing around,
she could see Reba and her aunts staring at the clock with clenched jaws and vacant
eyes. Only her mother seemed unaware of the chiming. Sitting ramrod straight, her
gaze was fixed on the fire. With flames dancing in her eyes and the filaments of silver
in her black hair set aglow by the firelight, her mother looked like a deeply troubled
queen.

“Mom?” Ella Mae whispered into the heavy silence. She wanted her mother to speak,
to tell her what she was thinking, feeling.

Just then, Verena came back into the room. “What a tragedy!” she cried and collapsed
onto the sofa. “Freda just slipped away. Like that!” She snapped her fingers and shook
her head in dismay. “Like a candle flame blown out by the wind.”

“Was Peter with her?” Dee asked.

“No. He got a call from Candis an hour ago. It seems that on her way home from the
hospital, she hydroplaned and ended up in a ditch. She tried to reach Rudy at his
parents’ house first—he was taking a much-needed break from the constant bedside vigil
he and Candis have been keeping—but no one answered. Assuming they’d lost power because
of the storm, she called Peter’s cell phone.”

Ella Mae thought of how dark it had been driving back through Havenwood after she’d
dropped Maurelle off. The strong winds had downed trees and knocked the power out
across most of the region, plunging the town into blackness. It had been restored
at Partridge Hill fairly quickly, but the majority of Havenwood’s residents were still
in the dark.

“Candis must have felt so scared and alone,” she said mostly to herself. “Sitting
there in the rain, trying to contact her husband, only to hear the phone ringing on
and on.”

“Poor Rudy. He’s going to feel terrible about not being with Candis when she needed
him,” Dee said.

An ugly thought wormed its way into Ella Mae’s mind. “What do we know about the Lurdings?”

Sissy gave her a quizzical look. “They’re not of our kind, but they seem like good,
decent people. Why?”

“Well, since we can’t seem to figure out who wanted Melissa and Freda dead, maybe
we need to think about the possibility that one of our kind hired a third party to
do their dirty work.” Ella Mae spoke tentatively, knowing that she hadn’t had the
chance to consider the flaws in her theory. “The Lurdings have been to the Shermans’
farm. Any one of them could have given Freda the tainted cheese.”

Reba pulled a licorice twist from her pocket and wound it around her finger. “She
has a point. What do we know about these folks?” She turned to Sissy. “Lots of people
seem good and decent, when right below the surface they’re as rotten as a fallen peach.”

Sissy nodded in agreement. “Do you have any confession pie left, Ella Mae?”

“One. Are you going to take it to the Lurdings?”

Verena answered instead of Sissy. “We both will. If they’ve got nothing to hide, then
we’ll simply have brought them a delicious meal as a show of sympathy. Our visit won’t
seem strange. After all, Rudy just lost his mother-in-law. The only way we Southern
ladies know how to deal with grief is to eat too much rich food, drink too much whiskey,
and wear big hats to the funeral!” She rubbed her temples and sighed. “Though I don’t
think any of those things will comfort Peter and Candis.”

“There’s something else to consider,” Ella Mae’s mother said quietly. “Now that Tilda
Gaynor’s at the top of the volunteer list, she’s probably in danger.”

Reba scowled and continued to wind and unwind her candy around her finger. “I can’t
believe the Gaynors aren’t involved in this somehow. Maybe they had someone else handle
the details, since that’s what they always do. Makes
more sense viewin’ them as the culprits, considerin’ they had a relative lined up
and ready to step in the second Freda got sick.”

“Tilda applied to be a candidate months ago,” Dee argued softly. “She wasn’t chosen
at the time because her company has a track record of hostile takeovers and the elders
felt we needed someone with a more balanced approach. Both Melissa and Freda were
interested in preserving the status quo, while the Gaynors have been arguing for a
more aggressive leader since the current Lady began to show signs of fading.”

Ella Mae put a hand over her heart. “I never imagined I’d be defending that family,
but I don’t think Opal is involved in the deaths of the other two candidates. If she
had a more recent, a more pressing secret, then it would have come out today.”

“What do you think, Adelaide? Should we bring the Gaynors in on what we know? Call
a truce in the name of the harvest and the future of our people and find the culprit
together?” Verena demanded solemnly.

Rising, Ella Mae’s mother moved closer to the fire. She picked up the brass-handled
poker from the stand next to the fireplace and began to jab at the burning wood. “I’ll
speak with Opal tomorrow.” Keeping her back to the rest of the room, she prodded the
logs until the yellow sparks looked like a mass of agitated bees. “There is another
possibility none of us have spoken aloud.” She stopped moving, the metal tool hovering
over the flames. “The killer could be one of the Shadow Children.”

Sissy gasped. “
No
. It can’t be. There hasn’t been an assassin in Havenwood for years and years.”

The word assassin gave Ella Mae the chills. Neither the fire, nor the soft blanket,
nor the presence of her family could stave off the fear. “I remember hearing about
them that night in the library,” she said. “After my Awakening.”

Her mother pivoted away from the fire and stood holding the poker in front of her
like a spear. “Yes, I explained how we’re related to Morgan le Fay, the Gaynors to
Guinevere, and the Shadow Children to the wizard, Merlin. What of it?”

“I’m wondering what chance we have against this creature,” Ella Mae said. “Even if
we all join forces and protect Tilda until Saturday night, this assassin could still
attack her in the sacred grove, right?”

“They cannot enter our sanctuary!” Verena boomed in a resonating voice.

Dee pulled on her long braid of auburn hair and nodded. “It’s true. They are too twisted
inside to gain entry into our sanctuary. They have become something other than our
kind.”

“I think the Gaynors are pretty slimy too, and it’s never stopped them from sneakin’
in,” Reba grumbled.

“How would I recognize one?” Ella Mae wanted to know. “An assassin?”

Reba snorted. “If you turn around and find yourself face-to-face with a silent person
with crazy eyes wieldin’ a knife, gun, Taser, baseball bat, or a big rock, then you
know you’re lookin’ at a Shadow Child.”

“Unfortunately, they look just like the rest of us,” Sissy said. “They’ve learned
to blend in and hide the ugliness of their twisted souls. But
most
of them are old. You see, the things they do exact a toll on their bodies. A twenty-year-old
Shadow Child can look like a sixty-year-old human. Depends on how many lives they’ve
taken.”

Ella Mae was horrified. “How could someone deliberately lead that kind of existence?”

“It’s in their blood,” her mother said blandly. “Very few of them can resist their
nature. They were born to hunt us.”

Reba held out her hands. “Don’t terrify the girl. At least tell her that there aren’t
many Children left. Their lives are nothin’ but evil, but they’re also as short as
my great-aunt
Helga. And assassins don’t make the best parents. Most of their newborns are dumped
at the church door in a dirty cardboard box. And those are the lucky ones.”

“That’s true,” Sissy said. “There are very few of their kind and they’re all loners.
And we haven’t seen one in Havenwood for decades.”

Sighing in weary exasperation, Ella Mae looked from woman to woman, her gaze coming
to rest on her mother’s lovely, anxious face. “What can we do?”

“Keep Tilda Gaynor alive,” she said. “She’s our only hope, as scary as that thought
may be.”

Verena crossed the room, took the poker from her sister’s hands, and slid it back
among the other tools. It fell into place with a loud clang. “Dee. Sissy. You should
move in with Adelaide until after the harvest. We need to close ranks.”

Dee stared out the window and shuddered. “I’ve never been afraid of the dark before,”
she whispered and then edged closer to the fire. “But now it feels like the darkness
has become invisible. We can’t see it coming or going, but it’s taken two of us with
it into the night.”

Verena put an arm around her youngest sibling. “The night doesn’t last forever, Delia.
You’ll feel better in the morning. Until then, I’m driving you and Sissy to pick up
your things. No one would dare try to breach Partridge Hill. Not even a Shadow Child.”

Ella Mae’s mother gestured at the fire poker. “I almost wish they would. My powers
might be growing weaker, but there are more weapons in this house than even an assassin
could defend against.”

“Like Reba?” Ella Mae asked, imagining Reba arming herself using the arsenal of guns
and knives locked in cabinets in the study.

“And you,” her mother surprised her by saying. “Everyone else’s gifts will continue
to fade until there’s a new Lady,
but yours seem undiminished. In fact, they’re growing stronger. Reba told me about
the appearance of the butterflies during your target practice. And look at what you
did with the lamb pies today. There’s no telling what you’re capable of once you fully
tap into your powers.”

Ella Mae tossed her blanket aside and stood up. “Then I’d better figure out what those
are. I don’t think an enchanted pie is going to save Tilda Gaynor. Or anyone else.”

The next day, Ella Mae was so distracted that she had trouble making her simplest
recipes. Reba kept scolding her for charring the crusts or not whipping the meringue
into the perfect peaks.